Thursday, April 22, 2010

Now, before you start - Yes, I know I need to post some photos of the kids! Ethan is approaching 7 weeks old, and we have lots of great pictures, but have not taken the time to post any. Insert apologies and begging of forgiveness here. It will be remedied soon...

In the meantime, yesterday I found what could possibly be the killer app for my iPhone, which I have had for a month now, and think is a pretty great gadget! I'm not trying to make a sales pitch for this app yet, because I have only used it once and there were mitigating factors, but the concept is awesome.For years, Amy and I have had a love-hate relationship with the alarm clock, and have talked about how great it would be if there was an alarm clock that could sense when you were in heavy sleep versus light sleep, and wake you up when it would be easiest on you and not leave you half-drunk for the first hour of the day. We figured that would require EEG-like monitoring, and didn't actually expect to see it "in real life", but "gee-wouldn't-it-be-nice"...

Enter the Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock and the iPhone. No, the iPhone doesn't have EEG capabilities (yet...), but it has what is apparently a pretty good little accelerometer that can detect the movement of a mattress, and that movement allows it to determine which phase of sleep you are in at a given point in time! Once you calibrate the app and make sure it can detect your tossing and turning, you set the alarm for the latest you want to wake up and choose one of a handful of sounds to wake you up. The app monitors your sleep and wakes you up in the half-hour leading up to your alarm time, based on when you enter the lightest phase of sleep.

So, I bought this app yesterday for 99 cents.

And I set it up and let it monitor my sleep last night.

Now, I'm guessing that the app didn't realize I got out of bed at 3:30 am to help Peter get back to sleep with Vick's and a humidifier. And I'm guessing that the app didn't realize my Blackberry went off 15 minutes before my programmed wakeup time, because I forgot to turn the Blackberry alarm off. But it did detect my stirring (when I reached for the Blackberry to shut it off) and determined I was sleeping lightly, so it went off a few seconds later. I figure that's half-cheating, but hey, it was the first night. It supposedly takes a few nights to get used to your sleep pattern, so I'll give it a pass.

The chart it produced with my level of sleep (and yes, you can actually directly post it to Facebook or email it to someone, if for some odd reason you wanted to share your sleep profile with the world...) does, in fact, show a spike corresponding to my waking up when I heard Peter and being awake when I got back in bed after helping him go back to sleep. It thinks I was sleeping more soundly in between the two, but hey, how can it know I wasn't even in bed?

Oh, what the heck.... Here is the graph. I won't be making a habit of this...

One other note - when calibrating it, it picked up my tossing and turning, but not Amy's, so it appears it won't get our sleep cycles confused. I'm not sure if that's a result of the app or the mattress, but it works for me!

More to come on whether this 99-cent app is the greatest thing since sliced bread or a waste of money for someone whose sleep cycles are interrupted more by his kids than by his alarm...